Current Research Projects

Mentoring Relationships Study

Canadian youth have been described as more socially engaged, educated, and diverse than previous generations, yet they also face unprecedented challenges. Youth are reporting social disconnection and mental health concerns at alarming rates. These challenges are higher for youth during the COVID-19 global pandemic, just as access to supports are limited - disproportionately so for those impacted by socioeconomic status and diversity indicators. Mentoring programs help meet this need.  Available across Canada these programs aim to match children and youth with caring adult mentors in order to improve wellbeing and foster long-term success. Through regular participation in educational, recreational and social activities mentoring relationships provide youth with human connection through support, companionship, and guidance. The key to success in mentoring matches is the quality of relationships, yet we do not know what contributes to their formation due to a lack of unified approaches to fostering mentorship relationship quality. To address this gap this project will: (1) build the capacity of school and community mentoring service providers to assess relationship quality of their matches based on current practices, and (2) improve the ability of mentoring programs to increase mentor/mentee compatibility and quality mentoring relationship formation.

Stay tuned for findings! To learn more or get involved in Canadian research on mentoring, click here to go to the Canadian Centre for Mentoring Research (CCMR) website!

Parenting in Early Childhood Study

Despite an abundance of available information, parents today are often unsure and ambivalent about how they should parent. Children’s exposure to socialization begins within the family, mainly through direct parent-child interaction. Early childhood marks a unique period in the development of parent-child relationships, because parents’ take more active roles in helping their children fulfill their different needs in response to their developmental changes. Therefore, we wanted to learn more about parenting during the early child development and education years. 

This research study is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Thank you to the parents, children, and teachers who participated in our study and made this research possible!

We are currently working on sharing our findings! See below for some summaries of what we have found.

Parenting  Adolescents Study

Despite an abundance of available parenting information, parents today are often unsure about how they should parent adolescents and how to access empirically sound information that is relevant and useful to them. This uncertainty is even more pronounced during the COVID-19 pandemic. The current study aims to gather detailed information from parents and adolescents about parenting styles, parenting and adolescent stress levels, and overall adolescent wellbeing across 3 distinct age cohorts.

This project is funded by a grant from the Killam Research Fund.